Trump Is Rapidly Expanding the Surveillance State as Protests Grow

President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and military against protesters in Los Angeles is widely being interpreted as a display of intimidation and state power ahead of his birthday, when Trump will oversee a military parade in Washington, D.C. in the style of a dictator. The president has warned that protesters in D.C. will be “met with very heavy force.” Democrats and civil rights groups say the president is inflaming tensions to justify further repression, crossing the line into blatant authoritarianism as demonstrations against his administration spread across the country.

However, perhaps the greatest consolidation of state power is not happening in the streets, but quietly being hammered out in courtrooms and behind closed doors, where Trump’s campaign of mass deportation is being used to justify a rapid expansion and centralization of the surveillance state.

“The idea that this is something that just affects immigrants is wholly untrue,” said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst and digital rights watchdog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with Truthout. “I think immigrants are the first target; it is a permission structure, and if they can get away with doing these things to immigrants, what are the legal barriers from moving on to the next undesirable group?”

This reality became brutally apparent on June 8 as law enforcement attempted to quell a protest through intimidation in downtown Los Angeles. A booming voice from a police helicopter hovering above the crowd announced, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” As Truthout has reported, law enforcement across the country have embraced facial recognition technology despite numerous studies showing such software is racist and results in false arrests. Pro-Israel extremists used facial recognition to dox campus activists during protests against the genocide in Gaza, including international students targeted by the Trump administration for deportation.

Meanwhile, Trump announced that wearing face masks would not be allowed at protests. The president does not have authority to outlaw masking by decree, but he doubled down on Monday with a social media post declaring, “REMEMBER, No Masks!”

In a blog post this week, Guariglia and his Electronic Frontier Foundation colleague Adam Schwartz argued that wearing a mask at a protest is a perfectly legitimate form of self-defense — and not just from airborne viruses. Forcing people to unmask in public is a violation of privacy.

“There has been a massive proliferation of surveillance camera networks, face recognition technology, and databases of personal information,” they wrote. “There also is a long law enforcement’s history of harassing and surveilling people for publicly criticizing or opposing law enforcement practices and other government policies.”

In response to the crackdown in Los Angeles, some protesters attacked self-driving Waymo vehicles, which have cameras that law enforcement have used to collect data on the public. Without a human driver inside, the autonomous vehicles have become a potent symbol of the rapidly growing, high-tech surveillance state, according to Emerald Tse, an associate researcher at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University.

“More people are seeing these technologies deployed in even more contexts, and that’s why people are paying more attention to this issue now,” Tse said in an interview with Truthout. “People were tagging and burning Waymos, which suggests that they viewed the vehicles as an extension of the surveillance state. Those autonomous cars are a way to watch everyone, and that information is going to the government.”

While mainstream media has framed the issue in terms of surveillance of immigrants, data on all Americans is being sucked into a growing digital dragnet. Guariglia and other privacy advocates are sounding the alarm over efforts by the Trump administration and its Silicon Alley partners to consolidate personal data on millions of people at the Social Security Administration and other federal agencies. As law enforcement increasingly turns to private companies to buy data instead of asking courts for search warrants, a data broker owned by major airlines has sold customer flight records and personal information to Customs and Border Patrol, according to an investigation by 404 Media.

“You are seeing that federal agents working under this current administration are very openly using surveillance technologies to trump our free speech, to completely violate our privacy, and not even giving personal privacy consideration anymore,” Tse said. “That is the thing that I am seeing that is new.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is in charge of Trump’s mass deportation effort, has worked with local police departments to turn networks of traffic cameras and automated license plate readers into a nationwide surveillance system that by 2022 was operating in cities home to an estimated 75 percent of the adult population, according to the Center on Privacy & Technology. ICE — which has collected at least 1.5 million DNA samples from incarcerated immigrants for nationwide policing database — recently inked a $30 million contract for system that can track people’s movements with “near real-time visibility” with Palantir, the controversial data fusion firm co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.

And even as Elon Musk, the audacious tech bro and Thiel’s Silicon Valley rival, makes an unglamorous exit from the White House, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) “cost-cutting” project he started after Trump took office continues to dig deeper into our personal information. On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned lower court orders limiting DOGE’s access to sensitive Social Security data, allowing Musk’s colleagues unfettered access to personal information on millions of people while legal challenges wind through the courts.

The bolstering of the surveillance state goes all the way to the top. On March 20, as part of a flurry of moves meant to expand executive power before courts or Congress can intervene, Trump has issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to make all their digital data available to his political appointees. The order aims at “eliminating information silos,” which may sound innocuous in the digital age, but Guariglia said in many cases these silos were intentionally created by policy makers and Congress to protect personal data and maintain public trust.

“We like to envision government surveillance looking like hidden microphones in our houses, or the FBI looking through webcams, but we should also think about what happens when our bureaucratic information gets weaponized,” Guariglia said, adding that people will be reluctant to share personal information in order to file taxes or receive health benefits if they worry it could be used against them.

Real danger arises when government agencies use data for reasons other than why it was collected in the first place. Guariglia pointed to World War II, when authorities used census data to locate and force Japanese Americans into internment camps, a gross abuse of human rights that became one of the nation’s darkest memories from that era. Census data is critical for maintaining government operations, but the system only works if people can trust that their data won’t be used against them.

“A lot of these ‘silos’ existed for specific purposes,” Guariglia said. “The 1929 Census Act was supposed to protect census data, and then the war thwarted that, and census data was used for Japanese internment.”

On May 30, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is deploying Palantir’s software to implement an executive order on information silos and share data across at least four federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (which includes ICE and Border Patrol) and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees health coverage for millions of people. The effort raises questions about whether the president is building a “master list” of U.S. citizens that would give him unprecedented surveillance powers, according to the report.

The report is based on public records and interviews with unnamed administration officials, and Palantir issued a statement denying that its software is being used to create a “master list” and accusing The New York Times of faulty reporting. Still, the news sparked angry protests on social media, with even hardcore Trump supporters expressing dismay that their leader had “flipped” and fell in line with the so-called Deep State, a bogeyman at the center of various conspiracy theories that Trump promoted on the campaign trail.

“Surveillance technology companies are the ones that are profiting off our taxpayer dollars, and they are doing it at the expense of our privacy free speech and human rights,” Tse said. “Palantir is just one of them. The current Trump administration is continuing to try to invest more in surveillance technology, and they have said that openly.”

Tse said government surveillance accelerated after 9/11 and continued to grow as technology advanced under Republican and Democratic administrations. In 2022, the Center on Privacy & Technology released an investigation into the sweeping surveillance powers deployed by ICE to deport immigrants, which includes accessing datasets containing detailed personal records of the vast majority of the people in the United States. By 2022, ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 75 percent of adults in the U.S. and had scanned license photos for one-third of all adults, according to the report.

The Center on Privacy & Technology rereleased the report with an updated forward in May. The original report documented surveillance infrastructure that could one day be used by an authoritarian president to “coerce and control” the U.S. population at scale. “We did not anticipate that this day would come within three years,” the authors wrote in the updated version.

On May 27, the tech reporters at 404 Media released a report and a trove of government records showing that ICE is accessing data from automated license plate readers that are powered by AI and installed by local police in communities across the country. These devices scan license plates, allowing police to pull up information on drivers and track their movements. ICE does not have a contract to use the license plate readers or the data they collect, but records show ICE agencies lodged at least 4,000 requests with local police to access data on drivers as part of criminal and immigration investigations.

“Automated license plate readers, I think pound for pound is probably the surveillance system in America that most captures people and most affects people at this current moment,” Guariglia said. “It is possible months later, years later, to fully recreate people’s daily routes in their cars just by accessing this data at intersections and cameras on the street.”

Guariglia said privacy advocates are constantly on the lookout for policing that involves gathering large amounts of random data that have nothing to do with specific crimes they are investigating, as such practices can be violations of privacy and civil liberties. Another 404 Media investigation recently revealed that a local sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from 83,000 license plate readers and more than 6,000 cameras across multiple states in an attempt to track down a women suspected of seeking abortion care in the state. Abortion is banned in Texas, but the sheriff’s office was able to search cameras located in Washington and Illinois where access to abortion remains protected.

“Once all that data is just collected and sitting on computers and collected by police departments, there are no rules dictating what they can do with it, and who they can give it to,” Guariglia said.